Tag: Idea

[An extremely rough sketch of some sections from the first chapter of the dissertation]

Third example: are there social Ideas, in a Marxist sense? In what Marx calls ‘abstract labour’, abstraction is made from the particular qualities of the products of labour the qualities of the labourers, but not from the conditions of productivity, the labour-power and the means of labour in a society. The social Idea is the element of quantitability, qualitability, and potentiality of societies. It expresses a system of multiple ideal connections, or differential relations between differential elements […] In all rigour, there are only economic social problems, even though the solutions may be juridical, political or ideological, and the problems may be expressed in these fields of resolvability. (Difference and Repetition, 186)

We would like to begin with the following thesis: it is by way of what Deleuze called ‘the social Idea in a Marxist sense’ that his theory of Ideas is established as a theory of the nature and function of Ideas. Additionally, Deleuze’s theory of Ideas, and particularly of the social Idea, is a theory that aims to show how Ideas maintain a logical and necessary relation to the questions and aims of revolutionary organisation and praxis. Thus, the importance and utility of social Ideas does not end with their role in the relationship between Thinking and Difference-itself, since Deleuze also goes on to show that it is social Ideas that give Thought access to the particular relationship between society and its possible, virtual, and structural, transformation. Thus, social Ideas allow us to think Difference-itself while also enabling our thought to have a political and practical import for the present. Now, just how Deleuze envisions social Ideas satisfying both thinking and acting (politically) achieve these two ends, becomes clear when he returns to a consideration of Marx in Chapter 4 of Difference and Repetition, and wherein he provides the following comment:

In short, the negative is always derived and represented, never original or present: the process of difference and of differenciation [actualisation of the virtual] is primary in relation to that of the negative and opposition. Those commentators on Marx who insist upon the fundamental difference between Marx and Hegel rightly point out that in Capital the category of differenciation (the differenciation at the heart of a social multiplicity: the division of labour) is substituted for the Hegelian concepts of oppositions, contradiction and alienation, the latter forming only an apparent movement and standing only for abstract effects separated from the principle and from the real movement of their production. (DR, 207)

Thus, for Deleuze, the reality of phenomena such as alienation exist is their existing as consequences of a more fundamental, more profound, circuit of Capital’s value-creation/self-valorization. Seen from the point of view of its social Idea, capitalist society is not simply defined by the contradiction between labour and capital, for example. More fundamental than this is the actualisation of the conditions of class struggle that aid in capital’s self-reproduction at an ever larger scale. And this is achieved, says Deleuze, by none other than the division of labour. That is to say, by means of the actualisation, or production, of individuals whose livelihood and social function is determined by their class belonging.

Additionally, regarding the above passage, it is worth noting that what is implied by Deleuze’s assertion of the division of labour as being more fundamental than the contradiction between classes, or alienation, is a position that views the distribution of identities bound to social obligations/functions and its social organisation as constituting that which fuels all other, secondary or tertiary phenomena such as contradiction, negation, and alienation. But what is this more profound, or founding, distribution and assignation of individuals to classes that Deleuze implies? It is, and this comes as no surprise for Marxists of all stripes, nothing other than the process of primitive accumulation. In other words, the division of labour that is the founding gesture of capitalist society begins with the division of labour-power as it was established in the genocidal processes of colonisation. In plan terms, primitive accumulation and colonisation continue to affect and determine the division of labour and subsequently the contradiction between labour and capital. This does not mean, however, that Deleuze denies the reality of categories as fundamental for a marxist theory of society as contradiction, negation, or alienation. Instead, for Deleuze, what this means is that it is neither contradictions, nor negation, nor alienation that can be considered as the ‘motor’ of the development of capitalist social relations. Rather, it is differenciation–or the process of individuation whereby what is virtual becomes actual–that determines capitalist development. Consequently, if it is this double process of differenciation-differentiation that acts as the motor of our present society, it means that the world of capital proceeds in such a way that any actualisation of its virtual elements entails the exclusion and foreclosure of other, alternative, virtualities.

More fundamental than phenomena such as alienation, production, and contradiction, then, are those objective and material processes by which Capital actualises (differenciates) various virtual configurations of society, considered both globally and locally. However, says Deleuze, this process of differenciation is governed by a logic of an exclusive difference: exclusive disjunction. If differenciation is said to explicate itself only on the condition that the actualisation of one virtual potential also means the barring from empirical existence all other alternative virtualities, it is because it is of the nature of the virtual to be both real and ideal, and thus real without possessing empirical existence. Of interest for our purposes here, Deleuze’s best and clearest example of this logic of exclusive disjunction that pertains to the actualisation of the virtual is given in his treatment of the figure of the Other; a treatment that concludes the final pages of the aptly titled fifth chapter ‘Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible’:

In order to grasp the other as such, we were right to insist upon special conditions of experience, however artificial – namely, the moment at which the expressed has (for us) no existence apart from that which expresses it: the Other as the expression of a possible world […] For it is not the other which is another I, but the I which is an other, a fractured I. There is no love which does not begin with the revelation of a possible world as such, enwound [sic] in the other which expresses it. Albertine’s face expressed the blending of beach and waves: ‘From what unknown world does she distinguish me?’… It is true that the other disposes of a means to endow the possibles that it expresses with reality, independently of the development we cause them to undergo. (DR, 261)

If it is true that the Other is an expression of a possible world, then we are obliged to inquire into the particular kind of existence that is granted to this ‘possible world.’ Is it the case that the Other express mere possibilities; where possibility is determined as resembling what is real and simply lacks the attribute of existence? Or, does the Other express a possible world, where possibility is defined as a kind of existence that does not lack the attribute of existence due to its non-participation in empirical or phenomenal experience? Relevant for our inquiry into the nature of this possible world are Deleuze’s remarks made prior to Difference & Repetition, which are found in his 1962 text of Proust, Proust & Signs. In this earlier work, Deleuze embarks upon a reading of Proust as a quasi-neo-Platonic theorist of the nature of Signs; and particularly of signs one encounters in the world. From this Deleuze offers a similar characterization of the possible world expressed by an Other:

The first law of love is subjective: subjectively, jealousy is deeper than love, it contains love’s truth. This is because jealousy goes further in the apprehension and interpretation of signs. It is the destination of love, its finality. Indeed, it is inevitable that the signs of a loved person, once we “explicate” them, should be revealed as deceptive: addressed to us, applied to us, they nonetheless express worlds that exclude us and that the beloved will not and cannot make us know.Not by virtue of any particular ill will on the beloved’s part, but of a deeper contradiction, which inheres in the nature of love and in the general situation of the beloved. (Proust & Signs, 9, my emphasis)

What makes this passage significant for our purposes is that despite their differing subject matter and when taken together, Deleuze’s characterization of various ‘expressions of a possible world’ clarify why it is that the actualisation of the virtual (differenciation) abides by a logic of exclusive disjunction or exclusive difference. That is, the expression of a possible world, whether as it is given in Proust & Signs or in Difference and Repetition, is the positive assertion of a virtual organization of the world that excludes my existence. The virtual as that which in the process of actualization expresses itself through the cancellation of certain components of actuality (e.g. one’s existence in the present world of the beloved).

To summarise: the possible world expressed by the Other is to be understood in terms of the latter and thereby is treated as existing since it is only the virtual that is real without needing to acquire actuality, or actual existence. As Deleuze himself formulated it: “The possible has no reality…conversely, the virtual is not actual, but as such possesses a reality. Here again Proust’s formula best defines the states of virtuality: “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract” (Bergsonism, 96). Thus, what determines the possible world expressed by the Other as virtual instead of possible is that while it is of the nature of what is possible to lack the attribute of existence, virtuality can only exist as participant in the attribute of existence as such. Thus, says Deleuze, virtuality is endowed with the attribute of existence, where existence is understood to mean the participation in what is real and whose participation is determined and measured by the degree of its ideality. Thus, to affirm, as Deleuze does, that the possible world expressed by the Other is of a virtual nature implies the affirmation of an expressed possible world as maintaining a degree of non-resemblance andnon-identity with actuality, or with the being of the actual: “[W]hile the real is the image and likeness of the possible that it realises, the actual…does not resemble the virtuality that it embodies. It is different that is primary in the process of actualisation” (Bergsonism, 96). Now, it is with a greater significance than that of an encyclopaedic account of Deleuze’s notion of the virtual that we give attention to the quality of non-identity that pertains to virtual existence, for Deleuze himself will go on to identify the ‘reality of the virtual’ with the ‘problematic’ dimension of the world, or the being of the Problem as such: “The ‘problematic’ is a state of the world…it designates precisely the objectivity of Ideas, the reality of the virtual” (DR, 280).

If Deleuze asserts that the reality of the virtual is identical with that which constitutes the ‘being of the Problem’, and if it is also the case that it belongs to virtuality to exist in a manner of non-resemblance or non-identity to actuality, then what is implied is that Problems (or the being of the Problem) maintain a relation of non-resemblance, or non-identity, with the various Solutions to which it gives rise. It is for this reason that even when Deleuze affirms that in all reality there are only ‘economic problems’ with respect to social Ideas, he simultaneously qualifies this by underscoring what is not implied with respect to Thought as such. Namely, that the posing of true problems via the social Idea produces as its consequence a set of virtual outcomes, none of which are identical to the present organisation of society. And thus we arrive at Deleuze’s well known passage regarding the possible existence of ‘social Ideas in a marxist sense’:

The famous phrase of the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ‘mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve’, does not mean that the problems are only apparent or that they are already solved, but, on the contrary, that the economic conditions of a problem determine or give rise to the manner in which it finds a solution within the framework of the real relations of the society. Not that the observer can draw the least optimism from this, for these ‘solutions’ may involve stupidity or cruelty, the horror of war or ‘the solution of the Jewish problem.’ (DR, 186)

Given what we have shown above this much is clear: what Deleuze discovers regarding any ‘social Idea in a Marxist sense’ is that these notions of non-identity and non-resemblance also come to define the relation between Thinking and the world, and the relation between Problems and their Solutions, and as mediated by Ideas. Additionally, say Deleuze, it turns out to be capitalism that is the Problem confronted everywhere in the present and thus it is only by means of social Ideas that we will be able to both construct this Problem in a true as opposed to false manner and thereby reveal the possible virtual worlds expressed by the problem of the overcoming of capitalism. It is by means of this social Idea understood in a marxist sense that the Problem of the abolition of capitalist society will find its adequate virtual solutions because the content of social Ideas is nothing but the objective tendencies constitutive of the present conjuncture whose future existence is in the process of being determined. It is precisely this dual function of social Ideas, as granting Thought access to the world while serving as the legitimate means for Thought to intervene in the world, that Deleuze is speaking of when he writes:

It is as though every Idea has two faces, which are like love and anger: love in the search for fragments, the progressive determination and linking of the ideal adjoint fields[the tripartite/synthetic determination of the Idea]; anger in the condensation of singularities which, by dint of ideal events, defines the concentration of a ‘revolutionary situation’ and causes the Idea to explode into the actual [Thought as the utilisation of objective tendencies for ends other than their own]. It is in this sense that Lenin had Ideas. (DR, 190)

To determine a system of differences mediated, not by identity but through difference; to discover the possible worlds expressed by this system; this is the conclusion reached due to the dual nature of Ideas. Thus, social Ideas not only apprehend the reality of Problems since they also make Thought aware of those aspects or elements within society where a revolutionary collective subject can reassert, or wrest back, some degree of agency in determining what comes after our capitalist present.

The question of the status of the plane of immanence has often been interpreted in a positive light. Namely, it is evident to the reader that ‘reaching the plane of immanence’ is portrayed as a virtue of the philosopher insofar as philosophy, understood as the creation of concepts, necessarily relies upon the plane on which philosophy’s concepts are brought into relation. As if to corroborate this interpretation, Deleuze and Guattari themselves write

“…Spinoza is the Christ of philosophers, and the greatest philosophers are hardly more than apostles who distance themselves from or draw near to this mystery. Spinoza, the infinite becoming-philosopher: he showed, drew up, and thought the “best” plane of immanence–that is, the purest, the one that does not hand itself over to the transcendent or restore any transcendent, the one that inspires the fewest illusions, bad feelings, and erroneous perceptions” (What is Philosophy? 60).

Thus the virtue of a thought adequate to its plane of immanence appears as self-evident, as something axiomatic; the inherent virtue of the plane of immanence seems to function as an analytic truth that is simply reiterated across the work of Deleuze, and his joint works with Guattari.

However, and against this view of the plane of immanence as both epistemic and ethico-political virtue, it is important to remind ourselves that while constructing the plane of immanence is a necessary condition for the creation of concepts (as philosophy’s presupposed non-conceptual, or pre-philosophical, correlate), this task carried out by thought cannot be the site of both epistemic virtue and ethico-political praxis. Why? For the very reason that, for Deleuze and Guattari, the importance of constructing a plane of immanence is not justified in terms of the ethical or political potential opened up by immanence as such. Rather, we must construct a plane of immanence since it is only in relation to the plane of immanence that concepts themselves take on significance and value for the thinker: “All concepts are connected to problems without which they would have no meaning and which can themselves only be isolated or understood as their solution emerges” (WP, 16).

The plane of immanence orients Thought in a way that allows the thinker to distinguish between true and false problems and thereby allows the thinker to formulate true as opposed to false problems. Unlike the portrait of Spinoza as the apex of the philosopher par excellence, Deleuze and Guattari’s contention is that while we all must strive toward the plane’s construction in our own thought, the plane of immanence itself appears as something wholly devoid of virtue and is not a model to guide collective praxis but a necessary condition for the creation of concepts. It is for this reason that Deleuze and Guattari do not hesitate to praise Spinoza’s fidelity to immanence while simultaneously laboring against the plane of immanence established by capitalism despite its necessary construction by someone such as Marx. Capital, as our specifically contemporary plane of immanence takes up certain tendencies from previous social forms in order to effect a world wide expansion. It is for this reason that we require a new construction of a place of immanence, since it is Capital that serves as the historical condition and futural horizon that determines the totality of planetary social life:

“A world market extends to the ends of the earth before passing into the galaxy: even the skies become horizontal. This is not a result of the Greek endeavor but a resumption, in another form and with other means, on a scale hitherto unknown, which nonetheless relaunches the combination for which the Greeks took the initiative–democratic imperialism, colonizing democracy. The European can, therefore, regard himself, as the Greek did, as not one psychosocial type among others but Man par excellence, and with much more expansive force and missionary zeal than the Greek” (WP, 97).

If the plane of immanence was simply the fusion of an epistemic requirement and political goal, there would be no way to understand their following assertion: “Concepts and plane are strictly correlative, but nevertheless the two should not be confused. The plane of immanence is neither a concept nor the concept of all concepts” (WP, 35-6). The plane is the nexus of problems that give significance and meaning to the concepts that come to populate it. In other words, and as Deleuze already noted as early as Difference and Repetition, the plane of immanence is the dialectic between Idea-Problems, on the one hand, and their possible solutions as incarnated by concepts, on the other. Once we understand that Deleuze and Guattari emphasize the need to discriminate the plane of immanence from its concepts, that we can no longer satisfy ourselves with the conflation between immanence and concept, problems and their solutions, the task of the philosopher and the task of politics:

“The famous phrase of the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ‘mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve’, does not mean that the problems are only apparent or that they are already solved, but, on the contrary, that the economic conditions of a problem determine or give rise to the manner in which it finds a solution within the framework of the real relations of the society. Not that the observer can draw the least optimism from this, for these ‘solutions’ may involve stupidity or cruelty, the horror of war or ‘the solution of the Jewish problem’. More precisely, the solution is always that which a society deserves or gives rise to as a consequence of the manner in which, given its real relations, it is able to pose the problems set within it and to it by the differential relations it incarnates” (DR, 186).

Thus, against the idea that a philosopher’s innocence or moral virtue is proportionate to the adequacy of their concepts and their construction of a plane of immanence, Deleuze and Guattari write,

“The plane of immanence is not a concept that is or can be thought but rather the image of thought, the image thought gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one’s bearings in thought…The image of thought implies a strict division between fact and right: what pertains to thought as such must be distinguished from contingent features of the brain or historical opinions….The image of thought retains only what thought can claim by right” (WP, 37).

The task, then, is to construct the image of thought adequate to our historical present since it is the plane itself that determines what Thought (and philosophy) can rightfully call it’s own, or properly understand its broader socio-political function in the present. However, if the plane of immanence is the Image of Thought, it is clear that a plane is only constructed in order to be overcome. It is for this reason that while Deleuze and Guattari emphasize the necessity of the plane of immanence, they ultimately assert that it is in light of the concepts philosophy can create (or the percepts and affects of art, or the functions of science) that we can overturn the image of thought itself. As Deleuze already understood, the “… ‘solvability’ [of a Problem] must depend upon an internal characteristic: it must be determined by the conditions of the problem, engendered in and by the problem along with the real solutions” (DR, 162).

Planes of immanence may be necessary, and we can acknowledge someone like Spinoza’s fidelity in his thoroughgoing construction as seen in his Ethics, while also acknowledging that it is only in the solutions within the plane that a philosophical/political praxis can emerge; whereby the emergence of a solution spells the overcoming of the plane/image of thought itself. In this way we should hear Marx in background of Deleuze; as Marx himself already understood “communism is not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself…but the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence” (German Ideology). Our fidelity to the construction a plane of immanence (taken as epistemic virtue), only gains in political utility insofar as the plane is constructed to its logical conclusion and the concepts created by the thinker within this plane is a solution that abolishes the present state of things…whose conditions (i.e. nexus of problems, plane of immanence established by capital) are already now in existence.

For what else did Deleuze mean when he praised the free reign of simulacra as the crowned anarchy at the end of his overturning of Platonism? The idea that the solutions to a problem; the instantiations of an Idea; neither resemble nor share in the essence of the problem-Idea to which they are indexed? Any position to the contrary and which posits solutions as sharing in the essence and remaining fundamentally identical to an Idea-problem, implicitly or explicitly commits one to a fatalism in the face of capital’s plane of immanence: There is no longer any available alternative solution to the problem posed by capital’s plane of immanence (neoliberalism). There is no longer such a thing as society (Thatcher). We have reached the end of history (Fukuyama), and the cause célèbre is this best of all possible worlds with the correct and justifiable amount of global suffering (Habermas).

“There are ideas in cinema that can only be cinematographic. These ideas are engaged in a cinematographic process and are consecrated to that process in advance” – Deleuze, What is a creative act?

[…an excerpt from an essay on Deleuze, Godard, and control societies…]

In 1987 Deleuze delivered a talk on the topic of the creative production of works of art; specifically regarding creative acts as engendered in cinema and their difference from other creative endeavors such as philosophy and science. In this lecture, Deleuze develops a framework around the question of creative acts and their instantiation in different domains of activity through the language of “having ideas in” cinema, philosophy, etc., as opposed to having ideas about the works produced in each discipline. It will be clear from what follows that having an idea in cinema and philosophy amounts to combatting a set of habituated expectations (audience) and produced art objects (artist). If it is already well known that regarding philosophy Deleuze attributes the creative element of Thought to its antagonism against dogmatic Images of Thought (all those bad habits of cognition that treats reflection and recognition as synonymous with Thought and a thinking of difference-itself); regarding film, and aesthetics more generally, the creative element of artistic production combats ready-made images, the narrative presentation of images insofar as it is communicative and informative, and the celebration of the rote and banal development of the narrative structure at the expense of using cinema as a medium to present, interrogate, and pose questions that contain the force of necessity for both filmmaker and audience alike.

However, insofar as having an idea “in” cinema is not the same as having an idea “in” philosophy, for example, Deleuze intends to signal that cinematic ideas are necessarily bound up with the cinematographic process. However having an idea “in” cinema isn’t simply a solution to questions such as: How does one go about filming a society of control? What does this world look like? How best to present the lived reality of the citizens of Alphaville and the stranger who visits this city? Simply put, the having of ideas “in” cinema is irreducible to, and cannot be confused with, the solutions to technical problems regarding the cinematographic process.

In addition, says Deleuze, to have an idea “in” cinema is not the same thing as communication or the transmission of messages between screen and audience: “to have an idea is not of the order of communication” (p. 104). For Deleuze, the communication and transmission of information is the circulation of order-words; the circulation of the fundamental elements of certain discursive regimes of power, which polices and/or attempts to render us normalized subjects vís-a-vís the process of Faciality. How does this relate to the ideas specific to film? Precisely because there is a difference between, on the one hand, a movie that produces its audience by means of positing what is most necessary and profound in the film. And on the other hand, a film that produces its audience by communicating information regarding plot and character development while jettisoning the opportunity to address the problems that the films characters encounter as the most profound and urgent questions that act as their raison d’etre. That is, by formulating the problem of necessity in film, filmmakers create the sufficient reason and significance that pertains to a specific set of problems encountered in both cinema and the everyday aspects of social life as such.

Thus, to have an idea “in” cinema means the fabrication, creation, or formulation of that which is most urgent and therefore most necessary regarding the film itself. For Deleuze, it is the fabrication and formulation of what is most necessary and profound that guarantees films designation as a creative activity: “A creator is not a being that works for pleasure; a creator does nothing but that which he has need to do” (p. 102). In order to see how it is possible to have an idea “in” cinema and not simply about cinema (opinion), Deleuze provides two examples of what it means to formulate and engaged with the question of necessity, or what presents itself as the most urgent problem in the world.

A). The Seven Samurai

Deleuze offers us the example of Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai as it relates to themes taken up, in novel form, by Dostoyevsky. For both the filmmaker and the novelist; and what brings them into relation; their main characters live in a world where they constantly find themselves assailed by urgent situations. Whether it is the urgency of Dostoyevsky’s character who is called to tend to his dying beloved or it is Kurosawa’s samurai who find themselves torn between fulfilling their duty of defending a village or devoting their attention to the discovering the meaning of the samurai-in-itself, we find character’s in a world of necessity and urgency who are being weighed down by another, and more prior, preoccupation. This is a preoccupation with what is merely urgent and important, but with what is the mosturgent, and the mostnecessary. As Deleuze writes

“The characters of the The Seven Samurai are taken by urgent situations. They have agreed to defend a village yet they are taken by a more profound question… “What is a Samurai? What is a Samurai, not in general, but what is a Samurai during this epoch?”…and throughout the film, despite the urgency of this question that is deserving of the Idiot – which is in fact the Idiot’s question: We Samurai, what are we? Here it is – I would call it an idea in cinema, it is a question of this type” (p. 103, my emphasis).

Here we see the idea proper to Kurosawa’s film: ‘What is a Samurai, today, in this historical context?’ Deleuze continues:“If Kurosawa can adapt Dostoyevsky, surely it is because he can say, “I have a common cause with him; we have a common problem; that exact problem.” Kurosawa’s characters are exactly in the same situation. They are taken by impossible situations. “Yes, there is a more urgent problem, but I have to know what problem is more urgent” (p. 103). Thus, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai confirms our earlier distinction between a film that produces its audience by means of necessity and a film that produces itself and its audience through the communication of information as the story develops along a plot line. Unlike The Seven Samurai that poses the existential and social question of the socio-historical function that is satisfied by the Samurai as social category, in films that operate by way of transmission follow a different logic:

“One communicates information, which is to say that we…are held from believing or not from believing, but to make believe that we are believing. Be careful: we are not being asked to believe. We are just being asked to behave as if we believe. This is information that is communication. And at the same time…there is in fact no communication. There is no information; this is exactly the system of control” (p. 105, emphasis added).

B). Between Speech from Image

Another instance of a cinematographic idea, can be found in the films of Sylberberg, Straub, or Marguerite Duras. What is common to these filmmakers is the following: each filmmaker creates “a disjunct between the visual and sound” (p. 104). It is through this incongruous relation of the audio and visual elements of film where we have, says Deleuze, “a purely cinematographic idea” (p. 104). This disjunction is a properly cinematographic idea insofar as it is something only cinema can accomplish. For example, Marguerite Duras’ Agatha and The Limitless Readings confronts its viewers with a dialogue between a woman and her brother on the one hand, and the images of beaches, avenues, and so forth, where the two characters in dialogue are completely absent from the screen. Unlike The Seven Samurai that makes explcit the gravity of the question ‘what is a samurai?’ Duras’ film engenders an idea ‘in’ cinema by doing something only cinema itself can accomplish – posing the problem of necessity, or presenting that which is of the utmost urgent/important matter for the characters, implicitly and without having to present the audience with the characters themselves. Regarding Duras’ work, Deleuze remarks:

“Simply stated, a voice speaks of one thing and we show something else…That which one is speaking about is actually underneath that which one is showing…To be able to speak simultaneously and to then put it underneath that which we see is necessary…The great filmmakers had this idea…That is a cinematographic idea” (p. 104).

For Deleuze, one can have an idea ‘in’ cinema in (at least) two ways. Either, by means of explicating the problem of necessity as we saw with Kurosawa, or by creating a disjunction between speech and image; by disrupting what we habitually expect in terms of a film’s audiovisual synchronization; disrupting our expectation of a one to one correspondence between speech and image (as seen with Duras).

Thus, if it is through cinema’s acts of creation; acts that are said to be acts of resistance according to Deleuze; when can we say the ideas created by filmmakers are also acts of resistance against the image of cinema as communicating information to an audience? It is clear that having an idea in cinema resists the cases where cinema falls back on the transmission of order-words; a situation where we are asked to behave like something other than the command to normalize and obey those commands is being communicated. This is the paradox of societies of control that Deleuze highlighted: it is a society based on the communication and transmission of information, where what is passed on is without content and simply an order, a command, or opportunity for the normalization of deviant subjectivities. If cinema can reasonably aspire to be an act of resistance against control society, it is because, following Deleuze’s remarks on Straub’s Not Reconciled,

“Her [the old schizophrenic woman] trace makes me realize the two sides of the act of resistance: it is human, and it is all an act of art. This is the only kind of resistance that resists death and order words, control, either under the guise of the work of art, or in the form of man’s struggles” (p. 107).

C). Two Kinds of Resistance: Political & Aesthetic

While it may be intuitive for our all-too Western sensibility to identify an act of resistance as something that appeals to, and defends, some set of inviolable characteristics that constitute a humanist emancipatory politics, it still appears odd (on first glance) that acts of resistance can qualify as resistant to control societies in terms of their simply being a ‘work of art.’ That is, as it appears in his talk, acts of resistance have at least two poles: the political and the aesthetic. The former aligns itself with the various forms of ‘man’s struggles’ against violence and subjugation while the latter aligns itself with the presentation of necessity through different mediums. Thus, and to briefly end on this question of the aesthetic category of resistance, it is instructive to turn to what Deleuze says regarding the paintings of Bacon and the painters tension with clichés:

“Clichés, clichés! The situation has hardly improved since Cézanne. Not only has there been a multiplication of images of every kind, around us and in our heads, but even the reactions against clichés are creating clichés” (The Logic of Sensation, 89).

What Deleuze identified as one more obstacle for Bacon to overcome (the cliché) is already at work in his distinction between a film that poses the problem of necessity for an audience and a film that simply communicates and transmits information to its viewers. The cliché for painters are the order-words for filmmakers. In either case, works of art qualify as aesthetic acts of resistance insofar as they produce their audience in a way that obstructs their reliance on habituated expectations and sensibilities regarding aesthetic experience as such.

The work of art as an act of resistance means the production of aesthetic experience, or an appeal to immediacy of the audible, visual, and sensible, in a manner that forecloses an individuals possibility to simply rely upon and perpetuate habituated ways of encountering a work of art. Thus, whether we consider Bacon’s paintings or the various filmmakers Deleuze makes reference to, what is always at stake is this fight against clichés; a fight against those ready-made, socio-culturally overcoded images, in order to afford us the possibility of thinking, feeling, and ultimately being in the world in a manner other than that encouraged and perpetuated by our present state of affairs. Aesthetic, as well as political, acts of resistance are thus revealed for what they are: a veritable re-education of our affects away from those moments of overcoding, capture, and/or our perpetuation of the violence inherent to norm of Faciality in the name of a collective refashioning of our affects that produces the powers (affect/be affected) of subjectivity in a way that does not require the subjugation of others in advance.